Using event destinations with subscriptions

Stripe triggers events every time a subscription is created or changed. Some events are sent immediately when a subscription is created, while others recur on regular billing intervals.

Make sure that your integration properly handles the events. For example, you may want to email a customer if a payment fails or revoke a customer’s access when a subscription is canceled.

The following table describes the most common events related to subscriptions and, where applicable, suggests actions for handling the events.

Events provide a reliable way for Stripe to notify you of payment failures on subscription invoices. Some payment failures are temporary-for example, a card issuer might decline the initial charge but allow an automatic retry. Other payment failures are final and require action, like not having a usable payment method for the customer.

For more details on how to handle payment failures that require a payment method, see the subscriptions overview guide.

Some payment methods might require additional steps to complete, such as customer authentication. If you receive these events, your app must notify the customer to complete the required action. To learn how to handle events that require additional action, read the subscription overview guide.

Subscriptions require coordination between your site and Stripe-the success or failure of a customer’s recurring payments determines whether they can continue to access to your product or service.

For typical integrations, you store customers’ credentials and a mapped timestamp value that represents the access expiration date for that customer on your site when a customer subscribes. When the customer logs in, you check whether the timestamp is still in the future. If the timestamp is in the future when the customer logs in, the account is active and the customer should still have access to the service.

When the subscription renews, Stripe bills the customer and tries to collect payment by either automatically charging the payment method on file, or emailing the invoice to customers. Stripe notifies your site of the invoice status through event destinations:

1. Your site receives an invoice.paid event.

   • When automatically charging a payment method, your site first receives an invoice.upcoming event to your configured event destinations a few days before renewal. You can listen for this event to add extra invoice items to the upcoming invoice. If collection_method=send_invoice, Stripe doesn’t send an invoice.upcoming event.

2. Your application finds the customer the payment was made for.

3. Your application updates the customer’s access expiration date in your database to the appropriate date in the future (plus a day or two for leeway).

Make sure that your integration properly monitors and handles transitions between the subscription statuses described in the following table.

Some status changes require special attention:

• A few days before a trial ends and the subscription moves from trialing to active, you receive a customer.subscription.trial_will_end event. When you receive this event, verify that you have a payment method on the customer so you can bill them. Optionally, notify the customer that they will be charged.

• When a subscription changes to past_due, notify the customer directly and ask them to update their payment details. Stripe offers several features that help automate this process-read more about revenue recovery.

• When a subscription changes to canceled or unpaid, revoke access to your product.

Register a webhook endpoint to keep track of invoice statuses. Your subscription integration depends on correctly finalizing invoices and properly handling invoice finalization failures.

When you enable automatic collection, Stripe automatically finalizes and begins automatic collection of the invoice.

• If Stripe fails to receive a successful response to invoice.created, we delay finalizing all invoices with automatic collection for up to 72 hours, excluding those where you have set a custom scheduled finalization time.
• Responding properly to invoice.created includes handling all webhook endpoints configured for your account, along with the webhook endpoints of any platforms that you’ve connected to.
• Updating a subscription in a way that synchronously attempts payment (on the initial invoice, and on some kinds of updates) doesn’t cause this delay.
• Invoice finalization failure prevents payment collection for the invoice. Make sure you listen for the invoice.finalization_failed event in your webhook endpoint.

Webhook events related to invoice finalization

See a complete list of invoice event types.

Successful invoice finalization

Stripe waits an hour after receiving a successful response to the invoice.created event before attempting payment. If we don’t receive a successful response within 72 hours, we attempt to finalize and send the invoice.

In case you want to treat one-off invoices differently than subscription invoices, check the subscription property in the webhook body. This indicates whether the invoice was created for a subscription.

In live mode, if your webhook endpoint doesn’t respond properly, Stripe continues retrying the webhook notification for up to 3 days with an exponential back off. In test mode, we retry three times over a few hours. During that time, we won’t attempt to charge the customer unless we receive a successful response. We’ll also send you an email to notify you that the webhook is failing.

This behavior applies to all webhook endpoints defined on your account, including cases where a Connect application or other third-party service is having trouble handling incoming webhooks.

Invoice finalization failure

If Stripe can’t finalize an invoice, it sends a invoice.finalization_failed event to your webhook endpoint. Subscriptions remain active if invoices can’t be finalized, which means that users may still be able to access your product while you’re not able to collect payments. Make sure to take action on invoices that fail finalization. You can’t collect payments on an invoice that isn’t finalized.

To determine why the invoice finalization failed, look at the Invoice object’s last_finalization_error field, which provides more information about the failure, including how to proceed.

If you’re using Stripe Tax, check if the automatic_tax.status field is requires_location_inputs, indicating that the address details are invalid or insufficient. If Stripe Tax can’t find a recognized customer location, we can’t finalize the invoice. Learn how to handle invoice finalization failures.

To test event destinations, choose one of these two options:

1. Perform actions in test mode that send legitimate events to your event destination. For example, to trigger the charge.succeeded event, you can use a test card that produces a successful charge.
2. Trigger events using the Stripe CLI or using Stripe for Visual Studio Code.